Meme: 25 Influential Authors

This is an old meme, from radical woman of color blogger Professor Susurro: List 25 authors that have influenced you over your life time. (They don’t have to be deep, they just have to have had some impact on your life.) I interpret this to mean that as well as books, novels, stories, essays, poems, the actual interactions with authors which have been very influential for me.

This is something similar to the last meme about poetry books which made us fall in love with poetry (you will see some overlaps here), and also similar enough to Oscar‘s and Rich‘s lists from a few months back about influences and predecessors, though theirs are influences on writing, and this I suppose would be influences on my thinking and writing, or on thinking and therefore on writing.

I’ve been most impacted by authors and their works starting in my later years in college (I finished my undergrad when I was 28) and onward. This really has much to do with finally finding actual mentors/role models for when it became much more clear that not only was I going to be a writer, but that there were specific historical, political, and cultural lenses through which I would be viewing, understanding, and writing the world.

Previously, I grew up fairly lost and undetermined, reading authors who were  supposed to be good for me, as prescribed by people who weren’t or didn’t know how to be invested in helping me figure out who I was and what my deepest or most pressing concerns were. I believe this is true for many of us writers of color, multilingual immigrants, non-white feminists, growing up in the American educational system, and with our parents, who have other things to worry about or are not equipped to do so, not necessarily intellectually guiding us along.

As well, over time more works by authors of color were slowly becoming known to me, writing from literary traditions outside of the American mainstream and slowly creeping into NY Times bestseller-dom. This was quite eye-opening and much needed at the time, despite how romanticized some of their portrayals of their own countries and cultures.

So here are mine, not in order:

1. Renato Constantino. As per yesterday’s blog post, while I can’t quite remember the specifics of my long ago readings of Constantino, something in my world view as a Filipino shifted quite definitively as a result of having read him.
2. Virgilio Enriquez, the “father” of Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Two write-up’s by E. San Juan, Jr. are here and here).
3. Edward Said.
4. Gloria Anzaldúa.
5. Jessica Hagedorn. Here, I am thinking not only about the obvious influence her novels and her early poetry have had on me, but also as we studied her in Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo’s comparative lit course, “Filipino Women Writing in Love, War, and Exile,” at UP Diliman, in which we read and discussed Hagedorn’s “Papologia,” which is her introduction to Danger and Beauty.
6. Ninotchka Rosca, Marianne Villanueva.
7. Eileen Tabios, Nick Carbó.
8. Marjorie Evasco, Doreen Fernandez.
9. Merlinda Bobis.
10. Luis Francia, Eye of the Fish. Writing as an expatriate returning to the Philippines and immersing himself, this is revelatory, and it is Francia at his best.
11. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. On Womanism, on woman of color feminism.
12. Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde.
13. Leslie Marmon Silko.
14. Linda Hogan.
15. Isabel Allende, Kiana Davenport.
16. R. Zamora Linmark, Truong Tran, Catalina Cariaga, Myung Mi Kim.
17. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh Minh Ha.
18. Al Robles, Jeff Tagami, Jaime Jacinto, Shirley Ancheta.
19. Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan.
20. Eduardo Galeano, Mahmoud Darwish, José Martí.
21. José Rizal.
22. Federico García Lorca.
23. J.R.R. Tolkien. Neil Gaiman, The Sandman graphic novels. Alan Moore.
24. Jimmy Santiago Baca, Frances Chung, Juan Felipe Herrera, Alejandro Murguía.
25. Nathaniel Mackey, whose texts I admit are really difficult for me to follow, but I did seek him out after Jaime Jacinto advised I do so, for he was reading Diwata and believed Mackey’s music would help Diwata along. It’s Mackey’s live performances which amaze me and make me think hard about how music works in my work.

José Garcia Villa is one of those poets who should be phenomenally important to me, but I am never sure what to do with his work and am afraid of simply objectifying him. Whitman, Ginsberg, Kaufman come to me later and I see where they are relevant to my work and thinking, though I can’t say they’ve rocked my world in a a life changing way. William Blake has always been there like a blanket I may need; Mishima and Camus have been there too, though I haven’t really had anywhere in my mental files to place these two. And finally, Marion Zimmer Bradley, for Mists of Avalon, which I am sad I will never again read for the first time.

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